"Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
...the fortune of us that are the moon's men doth ebb and flow like the sea, being govern'd, as the sea is, by the moon" [Henry IV, I.ii.31-33]
HISTORY NEVER REPEATS ITSELF, BUT IT OFTEN RHYMES
"There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America." Otto von Bismarck

Subscribe To

Sunday, January 31, 2010

CORRUPT is a nice word t0 describe the immense corporatist monster that the Dem Party has become, with the MSM, Hollyweird, and corrupt unions sluicing hundreds of millions into Dem elections while doing a PR protecting enfilade on the Dem flanks to keep citizens from bothering the RICO-style "legislating" going on.

A year ago, the Tea Party movement didn't exist. Today, it is arguably the most popular political entity in America. The movement is already more popular than the Republican or Democratic parties, according to a recent NBC / WSJ poll .Even in blue-state California, three in 10 voters identify with the Tea Party movement.And, of course, Scott Brown's come-from-behind blowout in Massachusetts occurred in no small part because of money and volunteers from the Tea Party movement around the nation.

Glenn Reynolds has more to say about the Dem/Repub hammerlock on our tax monies:

[The upsurge is evidenced by] the Brown victory in Massachusetts. A few Tea Party purists didn't want to support Brown, seeing him as insufficiently pure. But the vast majority made the entirely pragmatic determination that Brown, whatever his flaws, was vastly better than his Democratic opponent Martha Coakley, and just the guy to stop Obamacare in its tracks if elected.They poured in donations and volunteers (millions of dollars and thousands of people), and helped Brown win, and were immediately proven right as Brown's victory did, in fact, derail Obamacare and produce a general Democratic flight from the whole hope and change agenda.The Republican and Democratic hacks who were supposed to be worrying about this sort of thing, meanwhile, were asleep at the switch. Republican Party support to Brown was late in coming, appearing only after the Tea Party support raised his profile.Democrats were even slower to recognize the threat and react, and their reaction -- a last-minute visit by President Obama -- probably hurt more than it helped, demonstrating their tone-deafness regarding public attitudes.

What are Tea Party protagonists for?

Tea Partiers seem quite clear on what they're for: A limited government, one that keeps its nose out of their business and focuses on things like protecting the country in preference to redistributing income.As blogger Freeman Hunt wrote recently:"You want a big tent? It's fiscal conservatism. The people are overwhelmingly in favor of it.You offer that, you follow through on it, and you get the Republicans, the moderates, and a sizable chunk of disaffected Democrats."Only to the likes of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann is support for limited government a species of nihilism. But Tea Partiers are, in fact, working on a platform, which they've called the Contract From America . Though the name may remind some of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, this is something very different.It's a set of ideas developed via an interactive Web site, where voting determines which elements are most important. And it's not a top-down contract consisting of promises made by leaders to the voters -- it's more in the nature of a contract of employment from the voters, which politicians may choose to accept, or look for alternative employment.This is basically a crowd-sourced party platform, with the smoke-filled rooms and convention logrolling taken out of the picture. More dis-intermediation. I'm guessing that the political class won't like it much, either.But whether the political class likes it or not, this sort of thing is probably here to stay. While 2009 was the year of denigrating and ignoring the tea parties, I suspect that in 2010, they'll be listened to quite closely. Those who fail to do so, are likely to find themselves out of a job.

Even if Contract From America has shortcomings, it's better than the daily trough-swill and hog's wallow of Capitol Hill and White House politics.UPDATELibtards have their own little fantasy in the Mouse-That-Roared category. Last time a state/s tried to secede, there was more than a little hell to pay. If the fucktard dupe named Steele wants no war, he'd better not try to secede.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Rajendra Pachauri has again been shown to be a proven liar in helping to advance false claims at the Copenhagen Fiasco, which Clown-in-Chief Obama couldn't rescue from its hopeless deadlock.

Ridiculous scam artist is now shown to have used the error to win grants worth close to a million dollars.An interviewer from Science magazine:

asked him why he had decided to overlook the error before the Copenhagen summit. In the taped interview, Mr Pallava asked: “I pointed it out [the error] to you in several e-mails, several discussions, yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?”

Dr Pachauri replied: “Not at all, not at all. As it happens, we were all terribly preoccupied with a lot of events. We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early this month — as a matter of fact, I can give you the exact dates — early in January that we decided to go into it and we moved very fast.

“And within three or four days, we were able to come up with a clear and a very honest and objective assessment of what had happened. So I think this presumption on your part or on the part of any others is totally wrong. We are certainly never — and I can say this categorically — ever going to do anything other than what is truthful and what upholds the veracity of science.”

Dr Pacharui has also been accused of using the error to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

This serial criminal has intimidated Indian journalists and scientists who previously reported that the glacier melt claim was spurous by accusing them of practicing "voodoo science."

When is someone going to fire this con man who is using his position on the IRCC to collect, a la Al Gore, millions of dollars in Global Warming Hoax scams.

Dorkwad ESPN Favre-hater Gregg Easterbrook doesn't mention that Brett had just had a coaching error move his team out of FG range with 12 men in a huddle---that would be honorable and as I mention Easterbrook, Fleming, and a few other phlegm-hawkers at ESPN are simply victims of a borderline personality disorder---obsessive-compulsive nattering.

When Easterbrook suggests Favre WANTS to be center of attention rather than win another Super Bowl, he is projecting his own lack of any productive skills onto a great Hall of Famer. I'm from Wisconsin and a lifelong Packer fan until Dickhead Ted Thompson and his tea-boy of a coach ditched Brett and then accused the Vikings of "tampering."

Interesting that both Brett & Peyton grew up as Saints fans and would have been playing against each other while NO sat out another Super Bowl. Yeah, Brett should have run a half-dozen yards and then hook-slid to make up for the dumb penalty his coaches inflicted on the team, but he was running on fumes by then and probably knew that another tough hit would ensue. The pass was a laser, but across the field is still a no-no. Like a one-iron in your golf bag, not even God can complete a cross-field pass from a roll-out right.

Bill Simmons has a great piece on the top 15 officially tortured franchises, with Cleveland achieving a trifecta of pain with the Cavs, Browns, and Indians. Buffalo with the Bills and Sabres makes Lake Erie a terrible vortex of tortured franchises.

Michael IsikoffEric Holder Jr. may finally be running out of string on the confidence of this POTUS who has picked a mediocre cabinet [Geithner, Janet N., Holder, and the creep who wants to teach gay values to First Graders over at "Education." But the chickens are coming home to roost:

For weeks, the right has heckled Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for his plans to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators in New York City and his handling of the Christmas bombing plot suspect. Now the left is going to be upset: an upcoming Justice Department report from its ethics-watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the “torture” memos of professional-misconduct allegations.

Michael Isikoff, perhaps the only Newsweak reporter left whom I respect, goes on:

The report, which is still going through declassification, will provide many new details about how waterboarding was adopted and the role that top White House officials played in the process, say two sources who have read the report but asked for anonymity to describe a sensitive document. Two of the most controversial sections of the 2002 memo—including one contending that the president, as commander in chief, can override a federal law banning torture—were not in the original draft of the memo, say the sources. But when Michael Chertoff, then-chief of Justice’s criminal division, refused the CIA’s request for a blanket pledge not to prosecute its officers for torture, Yoo met at the White House with David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief counsel, and then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. After that, Yoo inserted a section about the commander in chief’s wartime powers and another saying that agency officers accused of torturing Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in “self-defense” to prevent future terror attacks, the sources say. Both legal claims have long since been rejected by Justice officials as overly broad and unsupported by legal precedent.

A Justice official declined to explain why David Margolis softened the original finding, but noted that he is a highly respected career lawyer who acted without input from Holder. Yoo and Bybee (through his lawyer) declined requests for comment.

Given the absurd counter-reaction of Obama to read Miranda rights before debriefing the Detroit crotch bomber, Holder may have to be the fall-guy if another terrorist attempt isn't caught offshore because of the absurd no-fly cock-ups [along with Janet from another planet Napolitano]. If there is another attempt within weeks, Holder will have been held criminally malfeasant in not allowing the Detroit bomber to be extensively interrogated by DNI, CIA [the FBI unit for debriefing terrorists is in typical FBI eff-up style, still in the formation stage after its authorization last AUGUST!!]. Maybe Mueller might have to go because the FBI just ain't up to any job except playing dirty tricks on other USG agencies like the CIA or DNI.

Friday, January 29, 2010

Chavez is in big trouble in Venezuela as his ridiculous splurging on freebies for the poor and his taking over opposition media [or banning them from the state airwaves] has begun to backfire as his witless economic policies drive the country into abject poverty [despite oil].

Venezuelans are due to vote for a new parliament in September. Last year Mr Chávez won a referendum he had called to abolish term limits for presidents and other senior elected officials. Now, opinion polls are showing unprecedented levels of discontent over crime, inflation, and power and water shortages. There were big anti-government protests in Caracas, the capital, after RCTV was shut off, which were countered by the government’s more modest rally.

These problems, and the resulting discontent, may well intensify in coming months. Even the president’s undoubted charisma has not rendered him immune. In one recent poll 66% said they did not want him to continue in office when his present term ends in three years.

If the September elections were run according to the constitution, which mandates proportional representation, Mr Chávez would surely lose his strong parliamentary majority. But a new electoral law allows the largest single group to sweep the board. The government-dominated electoral authority redrew constituency boundaries this month, with the effect of minimising potential opposition gains. The closure of RCTV, one of the main outlets for anti-Chávez voices, seems to follow the same logic.

In his annual address to Parliament, earlier this month, the president announced (to no one’s surprise) that he was now a Marxist. He no longer pays lip-service to the separation of powers, which in practice disappeared some time ago. The head of the Supreme Court, Luisa Estella Morales, said last month that such niceties merely “weaken the state”. A leading member of the ruling United Socialist Party, Aristóbulo Istúriz, called for the dismantling of local government, which Mr Chávez wants to replace with communes.

The Economist article outlines some of the ways in which Chavez has mouse-trapped himself with devious and deceptive and downright dishonest political moves---now he is hemorrhaging popularity and has to do a Gerrymandered system to keep a parliamentary majority in the September elections. He may try to finesse the whole problem by declaring a phony "national emergency" and postponing/cancelling the elections.

It looks like Chavez is doing to Venezuela what Peron did to Argentina---take a prosperous country and start behaving like a super-cacique until eventually, the economy falters as flight capital and reinvestment are paralyzed by a caudillo in love with the sound of his own voice.

Fidel Castro in miniature, Chavez wants to seize the rest of Venezuela's institutions and turn a once-wealthy country into just another third-world joke.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Obama demonstrates almost daily now that he is a clueless ideological retard. Walter Russell Mead, who up to now has been in the closet vis-a-vis any objections to Obama's runaway statist socialist agenda, now reveals a conscience:

Although President Obama urged Congress to pass a cap-and-trade bill in the State of the Union address, he seems to be flogging a dead horse. Inaccurate predictions and unethical behavior by some of the leading figures in the climate change movement have given skeptics enough ammunition to ensure that a nervous U.S. Congress will not pass a serious climate change bill in 2010. The news about East Anglia’s violations came the day after Britain’s chief science adviser spoke out publicly about the inadequate track record of some key figures in the global warming movement, warning in the words of the London Times that there was an urgent need for more honesty about the uncertainty of some predictions.

Not mentioned by Mead is Rajendra Pachauri's completely false and tendentiously argued assertions about glacier reductions in the Himalayas. Why Pachauri stays on at the IRCC after being totally outed as an obnoxious fraud [who called his enemies much viler names than that for questioning his IRCC omniscience on the glacier statements, which were based on an author who had long since repudiated his original statement and had not been peer-reviewed] is probably a function of the large emoluments he accrues as being head of a UN agency, tax-free.

Even Mead himself is stuck in a halfway mode, saying that all these violations the UK is announcing mean that "the anti-climate change movement will not soon regain the credibility it has lost."

Al Gore is watching the signature and crowning hoax of his career--- The Global Warming Cap-and-Trade Power Grab---dissolve as more of the IRCC report is revealed to be based on either biased or falsified information from "climatologists" sending in info that might trigger grant money in return.

Hillary Clinton was also absent and given Obama's current slow-plunge in national polls after the Massachusetts Massacre, the better part of valor is discretion, in the which better part, Hillary may still be thinking of '12. [Remember Teddy knocking over James Earl Peanut's re-run chances in 1980?]

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Obama is a Foreign Policy Disaster and the UK Daily Telegraph goes through the SOTU speech last night to see how the artful dodger avoided substance and exuded silly shallow rhetoric, an area where Obama excels, and demagogued issues he evidently hardly understands. The Telegraph notes that he gets an "F" for Foreign Policy, as he skated far away from real issues like Afghanistan, counterterrorism, Iranian nukes, and a myriad other areas where he & his feckless SecState are underperforming on the world state. His two Copenhagen visits, one for the City of Chicago to host the Olympics and one for a Busted Global Warming Hoax Masquerade symbolize this tyro's record of failure in foreign affairs---his record on substantive issues and symbolic ones is completely smudged by amateurish reaching out to our traditional adversaries, who thus far have taken our hostess gifts and then stuck a thumb in our collective eye. Not one foreign policy success after one year, though he did agree to two-thirds of a surge in Afghanistan. Urkel is simply not ready for prime time diplomacy.

The speech makes it very evident that the reckless and underinformed POTUS remains in his Oval Office Cocoon and it is clear that he has put on a game-face mask while flailing and looking for scapegoats---banks, GWB [again & again] and now the SCOTUS as the First-Clown-In-Chief had the witless effrontery to attack the Supreme Court's decision while the Nine sat in front of him. Here's G-Town U. Law Prof Randy Barnett:

To call upon the Congress to countermand (somehow) by statute a constitutional decision, indeed a decision applying the First Amendment? What can this possibly accomplish besides alienating Justice Kennedy who wrote the opinion being attacked. Contrary to what we heard during the last administration, the Court may certainly be the object of presidential criticism without posing any threat to its independence. But this was a truly shocking lack of decorum and disrespect towards the Supreme Court for which an apology is in order. A new tone indeed.

And the lying fool of an Obamanation of Desolation is either ignorant or demagogue or both when he said "foreign" interests could now contribute as a result of the SCOTUS ruling.

The Court held that 2 U.S.C. Section 441a, which prohibits all corporate political spending, is unconstitutional. Foreign nationals, specifically defined to include foreign corporations, are prohibiting from making "a contribution or donation of money or ather thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State or local election" under 2 U.S.C. Section 441e, which was not at issue in the case.

It gets sillier and even the socialism-inclined state-controlled NPR had to demur on Obama's slipshod notion that the SCOTUS ruled on direct contributions by corporations, rather than McCain/Feingold's over-the-top ban on ALL FORMS of contributions. And finally, the infamousLinda Greenhouse who has scribbled on the SCOTUS for thirty years wrote in the NYT opinionator calls Obama "imprecise:"

Indeed, Mr. Obama's description of the holding of the case was imprecise. He said the court had "reversed a century of law." The law that Congress enacted in the populist days of the early 20th century prohibited direct corporate contributions to political campaigns. That law was not at issue in the Citizens United case, and is still on the books. Rather, the court struck down a more complicated statute that barred corporations and unions from spending money directly from their treasuries -- as opposed to their political action committees -- on television advertising to urge a vote for or against a federal candidate in the period immediately before the election.

:We are now experiencing the consequences of electing an inexperienced rookie on both foreign and domestic policy, and one with a stubborn arrogant conviction that he is some sort of the Child of Destiny the febrile psychos on the Far Left believe he is---the true empty vessel which they can fill with their Marxist class warfare fantasies.

My guess is that this arrogant half-wit of a POTUS can talk a talk, but is a veritable cripple in actually walking anything except a moonwalk double-clutch shuffle on real policy.

It may or may not be the influence of the stars, but starstruck Maureen Dowd, who was described by former date Warren Beatty as "smokin' hot," in turn believes that Scott Brown may be, er, the New One.

He’s The One, all right.....The handsome, athletic pol with the comely wife and two lovely daughters who precipitously rose from the State Legislature to pull us all together.

The fresh face and disarming underdog America’s been waiting for, someone who suffered through his parents’ divorce, watched his mom go on welfare and survived some wayward youthful behavior to become disciplined and successful — a lawyer, a lawmaker and a devoted family guy who does dog duty. Someone who’s always game for a game of pickup basketball, loves talking sports and even boasts beefcake photos. A pro-choice phenom propelled into higher office by conservatives, independents and Democrats, a surprise winner with a magical aura.

The New One is the shimmering vessel that we are pouring all our hopes and dreams into after the grave disappointment of the Last One, Barack Obama.

The only question left is: Why isn’t Scott Brown delivering the State of the Union? He’s the Epic One we want to hear from. All that inexperience can really be put to good use here.

Obama’s Oneness has been one-upped. Why settle for a faux populist when we can have a real one? Why settle for gloomy populism when we can have sunny populism? Why settle for Ivy League cool when we can have Cosmo hot? Why settle for a professor who favors banks, pharmaceutical companies and profligate Democrats when we can have an Everyman who favors banks, pharmaceutical companies and profligate Republicans? Why settle for a 48-year-old, 6-foot-1, organic arugula when we can have a 50-year-old, 6-foot-2, double waffle with bacon?

Sounds a bit infatuated, but knowing MoDo and her swift tacks and direction turns, Scott Brown will be out of favor in her "Bringing Sexy Back" category when the dust settles.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Victor Davis Hanson unloads on Obama as his numbers head southward past Florida into Caribbean territory.

......a lot of DC-NY pundits ... mistakenly fell for the Emanuel/Axelrod thesis that popular outrage at Wall Street banditry, weariness with Iraq, and the lackluster McCain campaign would translate into populist support for a kinder, gentler socialism.

And now? On every issue — more bailouts, more stimuli, more deficits, higher taxes, statist health care, cap and trade, diplomatic apologetics, the shunning of natural gas, oil, and nuclear in favor of "millions of green jobs" subsidized by billions in federal "stimulus" — the Obama position polls 5-15 points below 50 percent.

After Van Jones, Anita Dunn, the Skip Gates mess, the "tea-bagger" slurs, the attacks on Fox News, the Copenhagen dashes, the bowing, the apologizing, the reordering of creditors, the NEA obsequiousness, the lackluster overseas-contingency-operation front, the deer-in-the-headlights pause on Afghanistan, the pseudo-deadlines on Iran, Guantanamo, and health care, the transparency and bipartisanship fraud, and dozens of other things, Obama simply does not have the popularity to carry unpopular legislation forward. Indeed, he is reaching a point where he may poll more negatively than his agenda does. "Let me be perfectly clear" and "make no mistake about it" are now caricatures.

So where are we at twelve months? Obama showed the country his vision of where he wanted us to go; he had both houses of Congress, a toady media, and enormous personal popularity — and he is getting nowhere. Why? Because most Americans are vehemently opposed to taking their country in the direction that Obama, Pelosi, and Reid would prefer.

Since Obama is both inexperienced and apparently a stubborn ideologue, I think all we will be left with when the novelty wears off is rhetoric and euphemism. Obama will grow the deficit even larger and call it fiscal sobriety; he will push for higher taxes and suggest the entrepreneurial class is the same as the super-rich who "made out like bandits under Bush"; he will declare that his outreach to Chávez, Assad, Putin, and Ahmadinejad has been successful, even as those leaders incrementally and insidiously readjust their respective regional maps; he will borrow far more money than Bush did and copy his homeland-security protocols, while continuing to blame Bush for America's problems — hoping that $2 trillion of annual borrowing, along with a recovering world economy and the resilience of U.S. business, will bring a half-hearted recovery by November 2010.

That's about all you have, when you bet your holdings on European-style socialism and it proved a losing hand.

The US is not yet a dependent society like many in "Old Europe," where living off the dole has become a generational way to roll. Unlike the Eurotard template, the US still has only about a 21% Liberal electorate while a huge slice of voters consider themselves politically and culturally conservative or independent. The US is still the most religious country by percentage if not public practice and its Second Amendment, First Amendment, and Fourteenth Amendment freedoms still prevail in the marketplace of ideas, despite a Stealth Attack on the Constitution by the noise machine on the Libtard Ultra-Left.

Back in the day, I was not only a Democrat, but worked for them in two national and many local campaigns as a National Staffer and local advance man/consultant. But that was before the Ultra-Left JournoListServ and Soros cabals took over the ideological compassion of the seventies/eighties and commandeered the Dems into a EuroMarxist slow-motion creeping socialism, marking old Norman Thomas's---g-dad of current Socialist M'ging Editor of Newsweak Evan--- famous prediction that "One day the USA will wake up as a socialist country without the word itself ever being employed" or words to that effect.

Just like the First Tea Party spurred the founding of a Revolutionary ethos, the second round of Tea Party activists were verbally abused by this feckless POTUS as "teabaggers," a sexual perverse act favored by ultra-lefties and their groupies of all genders and species.

POTUS Obama is about as politically sensitive as ol' George III back when the First Tea Party was followed by the First Boston Massacre.

History doesn't often repeat itself, but in this case it rhymes very closely.

Marco Rubio has come out of contender status to a dead heat, with a tiny 47%-44% lead in a Quinnipiac Poll. Crist was a shoo-in for the Republican nomination until he endorsed Obama's stimulus package and gave Obambi a bromance hug at a function last year.

Crist is flailing trying to make his YouTube endorsement of the Porkulus Bill go away, as well as his momentary YouTube viral man-hug with Obama. Rubio, who calls Crist a RINO who cannot be trusted [just ask Mitt Romney who thought he had Crist's Florida primary endorsement in the bank in '08 until Charlie-boy did a 180 and endorsed McCain just before the bell] has been a tireless campaigner whose youth and Cuban background offset his sternly conservative credentials. He is a Tea Party favorite. And now he is a mainstream Republican fave. Of course, the national media played down the Republican takeover of the Statehouse and both legislative chambers in the early '00s, but nobody will play down the ascent of a 38-year old Cubano who hates Castro and loves America.

Suddenly, the nasty "teabagger" insult pervs on the Left, including One-Term POTUS Obambi, leveled at the Tea Party movement are becoming fatally viral to the Democrats undergoing a thorough panic attack rather than their preferred Botox Makeover.

2010 is promising to be 1994 with even the Senate coming into play as Feingold and Boxer have become weak & Evan Bayh may get out-righted in Hoosierland. As a trifecta, Repubs may gain Reid's NV seat, Obama's IL seat, and Biden's DE seat. ND & PA will go Repub if hair-plug creep Specter is the Dem PA candidate!

Atlanticon Ambinder pooh poohs the possibiiity, but after the Boston Massacre/Tea Party on Jan. 19th, the unpopular Health Care and failing economy are both balls and chains for aspiring Dem candidates and incumbents. Plus POTUS In-Love-With-Himself is now around 48% overall approval, the biggest nose dive any POTUS has taken in his first term, according to Gallup. And he is the most-polarizing President ever, as he abandoned his campaign promises for a balanced budget and transparency to become the biggest spender in US history, running the humongous GWB deficit at 5.5 trillion to over $12.9 trillion and counting---ALL IN ONE YEAR.

The Wall Street Journal calls Obama's fervent narcissistic self-esteem "The Copenhagen Syndrome" And given the brain-dead allegiance of Dems on the Gallup poll, they already suffer from The Stockholm Syndrome of becoming enchanted with their kidnapper.

What the Democrats refuse in their delusional denial to comprehend and internalize is that the US is 20% liberal, 40% conservative and 40% independent. Both the conservatives and independents rarely register as Republicans, whereas the Dems have made it their goal to increase registration by hook or, as in Massachusetts, by crook. [MA cits who register as Dems to vote in a primary are not taken off the rolls unless they re-register, as is mandated in most states]. Ironically, it was the 22% of Dems who voted for Scott Brown who pushed him over the top of Martha Coakley. And there is a seismic shift of independents, 40% of the electorate, from Dem to Repub-leaning. Here is Bret Stephans on the Copenhagen Syndrome which has virtually neutered US foreign policy because of Obama's conviction that his karma is irresistible:

Mr. Obama's first year in office amounts to a long parade of rebuffs. His inaugural address famously offered the world's dictators an outstretched hand in exchange for an unclenched fist. From North Korea, he got missile and nuclear tests. From Iran, he got a contemptuous rejection of his extraordinary offer to enrich uranium for it. From Cuba, Fidel Castro said last month that "the empire's real intentions are obvious, this time beneath the kindly smile and African-American face of Barack Obama." From Venezuela, Hugo Chávez is now comparing Mr. Obama to the devil, a shtick he first tried out on George W. Bush back when liberals thought it was kind of funny.

Of course these are America's enemies, so we probably should not have expected better even if Mr. Obama seemed to believe we might. What about our (ostensible) non-enemies? The president pre-emptively conceded the Czech and Polish missile-defense bases to Russia in hopes of getting Moscow to take a tougher line on Tehran's nuclear programs. The Kremlin isn't biting. Neither is China, never mind Mr. Obama's gratuitous snub last year of the Dalai Lama.

As for the Muslim world that Mr. Obama has been at such pains to court (the Cairo and Ankara speeches, his opposition to Gitmo and the war in Iraq, etc.), the 2009 Pew Global Survey that measures opinions about the U.S. finds as follows: Turkey, 14% favorable views of the U.S.; Palestinian territories, 15%; Pakistan, 16%; Jordan, 25%; Egypt, 27%. Granted, this is up slightly from the last year of the Bush administration, but only by a couple of percentage points on average. So that's the great Obama perception dividend?

And then there are America's friends. Hondurans will not soon forgive the administration's efforts to shove ex-president Manuel Zelaya down their throats. Among Israelis suspicion of Mr. Obama is pervasive. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wonders aloud, "Est-il faible?" (Is he weak?)

Now the same question is being asked in the U.S. in the wake of Scott Brown's Senate victory in Massachusetts. The president from Oprah Nation, says Newsweek, suffers from an "inspiration gap"; the prevailing wisdom is that he's too cool and detached for his own political good. Are they kidding? Should the president now take squealing lessons from Howard Dean?

Mr. Obama's real problems are of a different stripe. It's not as if he lacks for charisma. It's that he believes too much in the power of charisma itself and specifically too much in his own.

He seems to have come to office believing that America's problems abroad could mainly be put down to the rough-edged persona of his predecessor. Change the president, change the tone, give magnificent speeches, tinker with the policy, and the world would revert to some default mode of liking America and wanting to work with it. It doesn't work that way. Nor does it work in domestic policy, where personal salesmanship has failed to overcome the defects of legislation. Americans still generally like Mr. Obama, or at least they'd like to like him. It's the $12 trillion deficit and Rube Goldberg health schemes that rub them wrong.

So what's Copenhagen Syndrome? It is a belief in your own miracles. It is thinking that those who crowned you king actually knew what they were doing. It is buying into your own tulip bulb mania. It is the floating evanescent bubble of self. God help you when it bursts.

Obama's naive delusion that terrorists have civil rights rivals Coakley's delusion that "there are no terrorists in Afghanistan." And if he wants a "shovel-ready" project for his ridiculous pork-barrel stimulus package, try erecting an Israeli-type fence along the Mexican border's most porous precincts. Then maybe Janet-from-another-planet Napolitano might be able to handle ONE area of her responsibilities.

Atlanticon Ambinder complains about the "right-wing noise machine," a JournoListServ rubric for any deviation from the socialism-by-stealth roadway Obama thought he could sneak by the rest of America while we weren't looking!

Marco Rubio is much more than a target for the Ultra-Left's slime machine like NYT writer Marc Leibovich. He is more than the wake-up call Scott Brown's heroic campaigning gave the Dems in MA. Marco Rubio is the Ultra-Left's worst nightmare, a guy talented and charismatic enough to open the doors of the ganja-pungent Capitol backrooms where the Dem leadership concoct their most vile attacks on the Constitution and the American people.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Joe Klein emits a colossal brainfart in Time Mag, which recently has become a repository for cerebral methane:

It is very difficult to have a democracy without citizens. It is impossible to be a citizen if you don't make an effort to understand the most basic activities of your government. It is very difficult to thrive in an increasingly competitive world if you're a nation of dodos

.

First, this hilariously egregious solecism by Klein reminds me of the comment of Kurt Weill in 1953 after Stalin's death & the resulting Berlin riots eliciting a rebuke from the GDR Stalinist Commie Magnates of East Germany that "the Germans were unworthy of the gift of Communism." Longtime Party Member Weill was heard saying out loud "Perhaps the government should find itself another People."

Joe and his buddies inside the Beltway, of course, never got the memo. The American people are, as Bill Clinton would endlessly intone, very good at discerning the good stuff from the BS. The memo Joe never got is that Obama's gang of Keystone Kops simply can't keep blaming everything bad that happens on GWB or on ignorance about the true merits of a humongous dead-trees slaughterhouse of a bill.

The American people are coming to a preliminary judgment on Obama. And the judgment, judging from his Gallup numbers lower than anyone else's after 12 months as POTUS, is thumb's down. He may rebound as Bill Clinton did after 1994, but Billy Jeff ate a lot of crow and signed a welfare reform bill. Will this bantamweight law prof with a bad case of narcissism be able to perform acts of self abasement or at least admit that he done did us wrong?

Klein and his Time/Newsweak/Atlantic/NYT band of scribblers overlook the socialism or corporatist fascism and the deficit-busting booby traps inherent in the 2000-plus monstrosity of the ObamaCare. They are really mere touts and cheerleaders and tour guides to an enlightened policy nirvana, in their self-serving p.o.v.

Their mantra beats the drum for government ownership & control, and they're going to borrow the stimulus money and push it into "shovel-ready" projects? The only shovels being used are the ones carrying the BS that Klein and his buddies distribute by the truckload. One small business owner on a comment thread asked about that tax relief that Klein was talking about. It's not in his employees' paychecks and maybe Joe swallowed another fishbait from Rahm-bo hook, line, and sinker.

The actual political movers and shakers whose jobs and futures are on the line, Democrat politicians, are deciding, like Beau Biden, not to risk the mood of a populace enraged by condescending patronizing asshats like Klein and a remote, aloof Pharaoh gazing like a Sphinx above us mere "dodos." Or like Cong. Berry in AR, to retire without getting a thorough drubbing.

One man's "stimulus" is another man's "deficit" that is going to have to be paid off. Gypsy bandits like Klein and the rest of the parasitic elites on the ultra-left can have all the patronizing condescending hissy fits they want. The American people are walking away from them, their BS, and their BS POTUS Obama.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

A Crocodile's Jaws are another metaphor for the way the 12% disapproval and the 70% approval Gallup's poll chart projects as both meet at around 47-48%.

Gallup helpfully notes that in a POTUS's SECOND year, his approval rating will typically drop another 5%. But as Obama begins his bank-busting crusade and blaming corporate greed rather than his OWN BIG HUMONGOUS BLOATED US GOVERNMENT and its aggrandizement at warp speed during his first year----running up an extra $2.6 TRILLION in deficits, let's hope that your average independent and centrist understands that this guy is out to ruin our collective future, with little to show for it.

"Obama erects a Maginot line" is the title of the Financial Times Saturday morning commentary on the President's sudden demagoguing of deposit banks and applying a "Volcker Rule" denying these banks the ability to make proprietary investments for profit or hedge their riskier portfolio "punts." The FT also points out putting the 7 foot Dr. Volcker front and center during the announcement while wee tiny Timmy the Tax Cheat Geithner was off to one side was a singular slap in the chops for the Sec. Treasury.

But Obama's ridiculous attack on the big banks makes even Chris Dodd, Senate Chair of the Banking and Finance Cte, cringe and demur. And now Ben Bernanke is under attack by financial genius Barbara Boxer, herself in a close Senate race for re-election this year against Carly Fiorina [nee Sneed].

A circus sideshow would have fewer amazing attractions and the only thing missing is li'l Rahm-bo Emanuel, who is hiding under his desk or perhaps emulating Gov. Sanford with a quick side-trip to Buenos Aires. The Financial Times sums up the whole debacle in no uncertain terms.

Being cut off from trading securities for their own book will not stop banks from putting insured deposits at risk. Their inventiveness in finding ways to lose money knows no bounds, and the most time-honoured money-loser of all – making bad loans – remains available. While it is bad to subsidise banks’ bets on mortgage-backed securities, is it worse than backing their bets on plain old mortgages?

So the “Volcker rule” will not end the subsidies for the (many more) risks deposit-taking banks remain authorised to take. If it also prevents them from hedging those risks, it may make the banking system less, not more stable......This “shadow banking system” was the epicentre of the financial crisis. In the Lehman Brothers and AIG meltdowns, the equivalent of bank runs afflicted money market funds, repo markets and securities lending: panicked lenders withdrew or refused to roll over the short-term funds that financed financial groups’ long-term assets.

FT ponts out that Obama ignored the step-by-step snail's pace of a regulatory reform program had been inching its way through the corridors of Congress.

For all its warts, a genuine effort at regulatory reform was wriggling its way through Congress – and at least a modicum of attention was being paid to co-ordinating such reforms at a global level. All this has now been blown out of the water by a White House seized by political panic. The result is that no one knows what will happen. A return to radical insecurity was the last thing we needed.

The untest young man voted in as POTUS in '08 appears to be living down to my personal expectations. And when crunch time comes and he loses a super-majority in the Senate [thank God for Al Franken bringing how crooked US elections are when they are thrown into courts!!] and he sees his Health Care [which exit polls in '08 election showed were the concern of less than 5% of the electorate] flounder, what does the Golden Boy and presumed Messiah do who was going to distribute his stash to all those "communities" he was organizing?

He reverts to the socialist/anarchist Saul Alinsky playbook and tries to demonize the enemy.

But the BIG Banks are not perceived by the American people as the Enemy, Barack-o!

You and your BIG GOVERNMENT socialist nonsense---that's the enemy of the American people!

I used to work in the State Department Bureau of International Organizations as the Middle East Officer. Then I was made Special Assistant to the Asst. Secretary of State and got to see a wide swath of at least the US and its relations with the United Nations. So I wasn't surprised when UN Climate Chief Rajendra Pachauri delivered a blistering rebuke to India's environment minister for casting doubt on the notion that global warming was causing the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers:

"We have a very clear idea of what is happening," the chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told the Guardian newspaper. "I don't know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement."

Then again, when it comes to unsubstantiated research it's hard to beat the IPCC, whose 2007 report insisted that the glaciers—which feed the rivers that in turn feed much of South Asia—were very likely to nearly disappear by the year 2035. "The receding and thinning of Himalayan glaciers," it wrote in its supposedly definitive report, "can be attributed primarily to the [sic] global warming due to increase in anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases."

Parsing IRCC Moron-in-Chief Pachauri and his own "arrogance" is child's play.

It turns out that this widely publicized prediction was taken from a 2005 report from the World Wildlife Fund, which based it on a comment by Indian glacier expert Syed Hasnain from 1999. Mr. Hasnian now says he was "misquoted." Even more interesting is that the IPCC was warned in 2006 by leading glaciologist Georg Kaser that the 2035 forecast was baseless. "This number is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude," Mr. Kaser told the Agence France-Presse. "It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing."

Of course, the idiot-moron-sh*thead Pachauri cannot admit a mistake:

On Wednesday, the IPCC got around to acknowledging that the claim was "poorly substantiated," though Mr. Pachauri also suggested it amounted to little more than a scientific typo. Yet the error is of a piece with other glib, and now debunked, global warming alarms.

That's right, Anthropogenic Global Warming is an artifact created by a cabal of crooked scientists of the sort Richard Feynman warned us about long ago in his classically eternal truth, the essay entitled "Cargo Cult Science," a CalTech commencement which is a short example of prophecy among scientific geniuses. [Feynman also prophesied that a Shuttle would crash roughly every 50 launches, not the 100,000 the corrupt clowns, oops, scientific PhDs at NASA predicted. The corrupt clowns remaining at what is now the national embarassment of NASA hate Feynman because he saw them in the '80's as members of the politicized monster NASA has now become].

And the WSJ Journal goes on to repudiate the D+ student Al Gore's tedious collection of lies called, oxymoronically, An Inconvenient Truth.

Among them: that 1998 was the warmest year on record in the United States (it was 1934); that sea levels could soon rise by up to 20 feet and put Florida underwater (an 18-inch rise by the year 2100 is the more authoritative estimate); that polar bears are critically endangered by global warming (most polar bear populations appear to be stable or increasing); that—well, we could go on without even mentioning the climategate emails.

The WSJ omitted to mention the most recent lie coming out of James Hansen's Goddard BS Center---namely that global temps have gone up over the last 12 years---Hansen is a well known crackpot in cahoots with another fraud named Schneider at Stanford who calls himself a "climate scientist." Pace chronic liar Hansen, the world temp has remained roughly the same over the last decade as the sunspots have disappeared that indicate another Maunder Minimum [1650-1725] of very low sunspot activity might be at hand.

Discover Magazine's 100 top scientific finds of The Year in Science Mag has the story on p. 45, entitled "Sun's Changes Have Surprise Effects on Earth's Weather," an article on Gerald Meehl and an international team of climate scientists sponsored by the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And Henrik Svensmark of the Technical University of Denmark says much the same thing, that intense sunspots shield the Earth from cosmic rays and generate a lot of cloud cover, raising global temps. No sunspots, as happened over the last decade, means that the cosmic rays disperse cloud cover, and lead to global cooling. Janet Fang wrote the rather clunky examination, but Discover ranks this as Number 31 in discoveries that are changing the world.Another Discover article on sunspots on p.54 is ranked #50 and is entitled "Magnetic Mysteries of Sunspots Decoded" which

"could make it easier to predict violent "sace weather" before it affects Earth. Sunpots often spawn solar flares than can knock out radio communication, zap satellites, and zap power grids."

No mention of how one might connect with another and mags like Scientific American and Nature have long ago given up any pretense of scientific inquiry, so you have to dig out the nuggets yourself.UPDATEAs if on cue, the feckless propanda tabloid Nature comes out with an editorial blaming a " small coterie of individuals who deny humanity's influence on climate will try to use any perceived flaw in the evidence to discredit the entire picture. So how can researchers honestly describe the uncertainty in their work without it being misconstrued?" while later in the SAME ridiculous howler piously intones:

Scientists should be careful not to disparage those on the other side of a debate: a respectful tone makes it easier for people to change their minds if they share something in common with that other side.

Looks like the East Anglian brainfarts who encouraged delusional lying and cheating about climate change have infected what used to be a respectable scientific news outlet which now deserves the bottom of a birdcage for its only useful and harmless purpose.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

The NYT has an article trumpeting the return of David Plouffe to solve all those little problems of image and positioning that somehow caused a "loss of momentum" among Democrats.

Let’s face it. Public relations and process tweaking are all the substance-less Dems can do, in light of the excesses of their opaque Health Care kickbacks, bribes, and payoffs, after Obama promised "transparency on C-Span."

Let me see. Obama-Lite is going to be rebrewed as Obama-Dark Beer? And it ain’t banks or the SCOTUS the voters are angry about! It’s broken promises of transparency, profligate spending and the takeover of government by crazed union bands of SEIU thugs. If he doesn’t get his health demands, Andy Stern will pout and refuse to donate much to his kept mistresses, the DNC & DSCC & other pet Dem causes. No tickee, no laundry.

And again. Rebranding by Obama is going to turn around what is now incredible buyer’s remorse among independents and Dems of a blue dog stripe? Float like a butterfly, sting like a gypsy moth.

The Dems don’t understand the distrust of BIG GOVERNMENT inherent among the center-right US majority, and have been the stupid party for a good three-plus years, ever since they grabbed the House and Senate in ‘06. In '08, Obama simply gave the machine its chief traffic cop. Now he's threatening to actually become the Chief of Staff. What a leadership move!!!

Now he will demagogue on banks, but he is really after corporations given free speech—he is preaching class warfare which is the default position of libtards like himself. Go knock yo’sef out, Barack! You don’t have a clue…..

Now the latest stupid move after Scott Brown upset the Dems' takeover of the US economy by means of strictly-controlled corporatist cartels and the Dems' plan to destroy small businesses apparently will be that Obama is going to come out in the SOTU next week demagoging Wall Street. And the SCOTUS parenthetically.....

Let’s face it. Public relations and process tweaking are all the substance-less Dems can do—Obama-Lite is going to be rebrewed as Obama-Dark Beer? And it ain’t banks the voters are angry about! It’s broken promises of transparency, profligate spending and the takeover of government by crazed union bands of SEIU thugs. If he doesn’t get his health demands, Andy Stern will pout and refuse to donate much to his kept mistresses, the DNC & DSCC.

Rebranding by Obama is going to turn around what is now incredible buyer’s remorse among independents and Dems of a blue dog stripe? Float like a butterfly, sting like a gypsy moth.

And for the first time, I think Obama is almost consciously going to turn a disaster into a catastrophe for the Dems—or else he is simply suicidally stupid to demagogue Wall Street when it’s Big Government the majority of voters is terrified about.

And Obama is too remote and delusional to realize that the communities he organized are a mere one/tenth of the entire USA. And that ACORN is not a corporate person....!

The Cleveland Plain Dealer's Sabrina Eaton sleuthed out that a very articulate writer identifying him/herself as "Ellie Light" has been writing letters to newspapers all over the country WITH A LOCAL ADDRESS ATTACHED TO EACH LETTER:

“It’s time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a president can’t just wave a magic wand and fix everything,” said a letter from alleged Philadelphian Ellie Light, that was published in the Jan. 19 edition of The Philadelphia Daily News.A letter from Light in the Jan. 20 edition of the San Francisco Examiner concluded with an identical sentence, but with an address for Light all the way across the country in Daly City, California.Variations of Light’s letter ran in Ohio’s Mansfield News Journal on Jan. 13, with Light claiming an address in Mansfield; in New Mexico’s Ruidoso News on Jan. 12, claiming an address in Three Rivers; in South Carolina’s The Sun News on Jan. 18, claiming an address in Myrtle Beach; and in the Daily News Leader of Staunton, Virginia on Jan. 15, claiming an address in Waynesboro. Her publications list includes other papers in Ohio, West Virginia, Maine, Michigan, Iowa, Pennsylvania and California, all claiming separate addresses.

Light – who e-mailed an identical missive to this reporter on Jan. 16 without listing a hometown – would not answer e-mailed questions about the address discrepancies in newspapers that ran her letter, or her identity, although she did say she wasn’t a former co-worker of this reporter’s who had a similar name.“I do not write as a representative of any organization,” she said in an e-mail. “The letter I wrote was motivated by surprise and wonderment at the absence of any media support for our President, who won a record-breaking election by a landslide less than 18 months ago, and now, seems to be abandoned by all, supposedly for the infantile reason that he couldn’t make all of Bush’s errors disappear in one day.”

Any observer with a journalistic background knows that these "false flag" operations have a number of different M.O.'s. For instance, the JournoList All Stars project with their online and occasionally dead-tree offerings, all coordinated & activated by Soros-financed types like Alterman and other paid hacks and flacks. I remember a while back when GWBush's team had allegedly inserted a reporter into the press pool and one would think that the First Amendment was under attack the way the political commissars on the Ultra-Left spun it.

Now that the SCOTUS has ruled that corporations can act as persons, a rule that was true until the silly McCain-Feingold aberration in '02, the Ueber Left in one of their coordinated scrums dishonestly claims the SCOTUS has overthrown "over a hundred years of precedents" and doesn't mention that the SCOTUS slam-down of M-F supports the First Amendment. Even the corrupt NYT has now abandoned the First Amendment crusade it promoted when it threatened national security by publishing numerous "security leaks." I guess one of the reasons the Grey Lady is losing circulation lies in the dishonest hypocritical pivot left the NYT and other journals have taken in supporting Obama..

Obama's plan is to impose statist socialist nanny rule by Politically Correct second-raters like Janet Napolitano. She of the "dangerous tea party activists" who pay their taxes, have jobs and don't get gov't kickbacks like ACORN.

I doubt if the slugabeds at ACORN have the candlepower to pull off a feat like "Ellie Light" does. One blogger mentions that both "Ellie" and Light mean the same thing if you use a Greek language template. Perhaps those rumored phone chats every morning between Rahm-bo and George Stephanopoulos has resulted in this cute little scam, executed by eager-to-please go-fers at ABC News [which selected Michelle Obama Friday instead of Scott Brown as "Person of the Week."]

Or again, this may be Soros money doing its corrupt thing with the delusional Far Left amoral totalitarian wannabes driving the talking points of "Ellie's" little letters.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Daniel Henninger says Scott Brown is the MA voters' first real revolt against the public sector's takeover of the state's economy:

What an irony it is that in the same week the Kennedy labor legacy hit the wall in Massachusetts, the NEA approved a $1 million donation from the union's contingency fund to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. It is this Kennedy legacy, the public union tax and spend machine, that drove blue Massachusetts into revolt Tuesday.

Yes, health care was ground zero, but Massachusetts—like New Jersey, like California, like New York—has been building toward this explosion for years.

According to a study done for the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, spending in specific public categories there skyrocketed the past 20 years (1987 to 2007).

Public safety: up 139%; social services, 130%; education, 44%. And of course Medicaid Madness, up 163%, before MassCare kicked in more Medicaid obligations.

But here's the party's self-destroying kicker: Feeding the public unions' wage demands starved other government responsibilities. It ruined our ability to have a useful debate about any other public functions.

Massachusetts' spending fell for mental health, the environment, housing and higher education. The physical infrastructure in blue states is literally falling apart. But look at those public wage and pension-related outlays. Ever upward.

To a surprising degree, the voters perceived the Republicans as doing very much the same thing for their own constituencies in 2006 and kicked them out of power in the House and Senate and in 2008 from the White House. But the people didn't get what they were promised by Obama, who very soon took Republican fiscal hypocrisy and let the Dem majorities turn it into warp speed Weimar-type hyper-spending with a dollar losing all international credibility:

Enter the Obama administration, the first one born and raised inside this public bubble, with zero private-sector Cabinet members. Act one: a $787 billion stimulus bill, which they brag mainly saved state and local jobs. Then came the six-month odyssey for Obama's $1 trillion health-care bill, dripping with taxes. Independent voters felt like everything was being sucked into a public-sector vortex.

This is why New Jersey's Chris Christie won running on nothing. It's why in California Carly Fiorina is within three points of Sen. Barbara Boxer. It's why the party JFK enabled, "the machine," is hitting the wall.

The Democrats are being strangled like Laocoan in the famous statue by the enormous python called the public sector unions who along with their AFL-CIO & UAW & NEA & AFTA counterparts are beginning to strangle the US economy. Indeed, it was the sleazy corrupt deal that the Dems made with the unions over tax breaks on their Cadillac health care programs that sent Scott Brown's numbers soaring from 20 points BEHIND on Dec. 28th to 5 points AHEAD on January 19th. After the Louisiana Purchase and the Cornhusker Kickback, the immense unprecedented kickback to the unions showed the total corruption of the Democrats and Scott Brown gained MORE THAN A POINT A DAY with completely disgusted Massachusetts voters sick and tired of being treated as tax serfs.

There's no way out for these Democrats. They made a Faustian bargain 40 years ago with the public unions. For the outlays alone, they'll get some version of the Obama health-care bill. They'll also go to the same old "populist anger" well.

Scott Brown's victory has given the GOP a rare, narrow chance to align itself with an electorate that understands its anger. Now the GOP has to find a way to disconnect from a political legacy that smothered governments at all levels and is now smothering the Democratic Party.

After watching an interview of Mitch McConnell by Greta van S. last night, I doubt that the old Minority Leader's nuanced laid-back logrolling will suffice to keep the Republicans rolling toward a takeover of the House and gaining seven seats in the Senate. Courtly and cunning is charming, but it takes the brilliant simple clarity of Scott Brown, who responded to Obama's airy dismissal of his pickup truck with characteristic intensity: "We should be in an economy where more people can afford to buy a flatbed."

It is, in fact, an economic-growth message, the likes of which we haven't heard since Jack Kemp promoted it in the late 1970s. And the brilliance of Scott Brown was to use the JFK tax cuts -- an across-the-board reduction in marginal tax rates -- to attract Democrats and independents to his message.

An across-the-board tax cut is the fairest pro-growth message of them all. Lower tax rates for everybody. Get out of the box of rich people and class warfare. For the Ted Kennedy Democrats, that box has been a loser for decades. But for timid Republicans always on the defensive, now is the time to break out and adopt the Scott Brown theme.

This is what Reagan did. This is why the Gipper touted JFK's across-the-board tax cuts. Republicans must now be bold and fight for across-the-board tax relief, for families, individuals and businesses, along with smaller government, fewer services and across-the-board spending cuts.

While Team Obama is fighting for more government employment, with trillions of dollars of spending, it is time for Republicans to fight for private free-enterprise employment by letting folks keep more of what they earn and by providing new incentives for the extra hour worked and the extra investment dollar put at risk.

This is where the GOP must go. Republicans should not let another day pass without unleashing a fusillade of new tax-cutting proposals to get America moving again.

Larry Kudlow points out the sheer hedgehog brilliance of Scott Brown [versus Obama's Fox] in an article called "Are Republicans Listening to the Scott Brown Message?"

Obama's tax hikes and spending explosion are what caused the populist tea-party revolt that was punctuated by Brown's extraordinary victory. And that leads to the next question. Are the Republicans listening? Do they really understand why Brown was victorious? If they do, why aren't members of the Republican leadership loudly campaigning for an end to tax hikes, just like Scott Brown?

The cornucopia of tax hikes currently on the table includes higher levies on capital gains, top earners, dividends, investment (via the payroll tax), carbon, millionaires, banks, stock transactions and estates (via the death tax). It's a long Democratic wish list of anti-growth policies, and Scott Brown's triumph should signal the end of it. But it won't happen unless GOP congressional leaders make a bid deal about it.

For example, some Blue Dog Democrats want to extend the Bush tax cuts, rather than letting them expire next year. Republican leaders should be making a big deal about this. They need to get it front and center, making expiration a condition to any new legislation.

Remember that Brown ran on a JFK/Ronald Reagan platform of across-the-board tax cuts to promote economic growth. Take a look at what the senator-elect had to say during his victory speech Tuesday night:

"This (health care) bill is not being debated openly and fairly. It will raise taxes, it will hurt Medicare, it will destroy jobs and run our nation deeper into debt. ... I will work in the Senate to put the government back on the side of people who create jobs and the millions of people who need jobs. And remember, as President John F. Kennedy stated, that starts with across-the-board tax cuts for businesses and families to create jobs, put more money in people's pockets and stimulate the economy. It's that simple."

There you have it. Scott Brown could not have been any clearer. That's the great thing about his message -- its breathtaking clarity. Across-the-board tax cuts and a revival of free-market capitalism on the supply-side.

And recall that when President Obama mocked Scott Brown for driving a pickup truck, Brown quickly responded that unfortunately, in this economy, not everyone can buy a pickup. "My goal is to change that," he said on the eve of the election, "by cutting spending, lowering taxes and letting people keep more of their own money." Right on message.

And during that campaign, Brown argued that health care reform is a tax hike and that cap-and-trade is a tax hike. This should become the Republican message, too. It's about taxes, as well as spending.

A recent Washington Post poll showed that by 58 percent to 38 percent, voters want smaller government and fewer government services. This, too, should be the Republican congressional message.

It is, in fact, an economic-growth message, the likes of which we haven't heard since Jack Kemp promoted it in the late 1970s. And the brilliance of Scott Brown was to use the JFK tax cuts -- an across-the-board reduction in marginal tax rates -- to attract Democrats and independents to his message.

Scott Brown, as Kudlow ends his piece, has a certain Reagan quality---a charisma that JFK also had---of keeping his eye on one big ball.

As Sir Isaiah Berlin says in his famous essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, the Fox knows many things [Obama is a policy wonk] but the Hedgehog knows ONE BIG THING.

What Scott Brown knows is that money in people's pockets from jobs is much more important than government nanny care. And taxes destroiy jobs and take money from people's pockets.

Leaving them unable, in his brilliant rejoinder to Obama's condescending attitude toward his truck, free to buy a pickup.

Karl Rove responds to David Axelrod's intemperate clumsy attempts to defend Obama by finger-pointing blame back at George W. Bush:

Mr. Axelrod wrote that no one is entitled to his own facts, even as he argued that George W. Bush is responsible for Barack Obama's deficits. He argued that Mr. Bush forced the hand of this administration by leaving office in the midst of a sharp recession.

Axelrod fails to point out, of course, that the housing market collapse which led to the sharp recession was engendered by the Community Readjustment Act put in full strength by Clinton and A. Cuomo in 1995. This act, enforced by quasi-government enforcement activists like ACORN, eventually forced banks to make risky loans to Dem constituents without jobs or the work ethic to pursue jobs. When GWB and McCain recognized the long-term danger of CRA's risky loans, they were adamantly opposed by Democrats like Barney Frank and latterly Barack Obama, elected in 2004. As Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac became overwhelmed by the bad loans defaulting, loans forced on bank by CRA activists like ACORN which threatened litigation, financial markets crashed and GWB was left with a housing market and Wall Street in smoldering ruins. Liars like David Axelrod blame GWB, not Frank, Obama, Clinton, Cuomo, Janet from another planet Reno who threatened lawsuits and other Dem culprits. Rove:

That argument won't fly for two reasons. First, at some point this administration has to take responsibility for itself. It's also not even close to accurate. Consider that from Jan. 20, 2001, to Jan. 20, 2009, the debt held by the public grew $3 trillion under Mr. Bush—to $6.3 trillion from $3.3 trillion at a time when the national economy grew as well.

By comparison, from the day Mr. Obama took office last year to the end of the current fiscal year, according to the Office of Management and Budget, the debt held by the public will grow by $3.3 trillion. In 20 months, Mr. Obama will add as much debt as Mr. Bush ran up in eight years.

Obama's boundless recklessness was noticed in MA by lifelong Dems like "Marlene Connolly is a 73-year-old Massachusetts Democrat who cast her first vote for a Republican in supporting Scott Brown"...saying: "If Massachusetts puts Brown in, it's a message of 'that's enough.' Let's stop the giveaways and let's get jobs going," as quoted in the New York Times.

Mr. Obama's spending plan approved by Congress last February calls for doubling the national debt in five years and nearly tripling it in 10.

Mr. Bush's deficits ran an average of 3.2% of GDP, slightly above the post World War II average of 2.7%. Mr. Obama's plan calls for deficits that will average 4.2% over the next decade.

Team Obama has been on history's biggest spending spree, which has included a $787 billion stimulus, a $30 billion expansion of a child health-care program, and a $410 billion federal spending bill that increased nondefense discretionary spending 10% for the last half of fiscal year 2009. Mr. Obama also hiked nondefense discretionary spending another 12% for fiscal year 2010.

In contrast to the sneaky underhanded attempt by Obama and his dishonest colleagues Axelrod and Emanuel to undertake a government takeover of the economy by stealth and a Health Care debacle crafted in opaque backroom deals directly contradicting serial liar Obama's eight campaign promises for "negotiations conducted on C-Span," GWB had transparency:

Mr. Bush did move to give voters more control over their tax dollars. Both his Social Security reform ideas and the drug program he created offered templates for driving federal spending curves in the right direction, counter to what Democrats wanted to do.

Democrats, for example, proposed creating a prescription drug program as an alternative to the one Mr. Bush proposed that would have cost a projected $800 billion over 10 years. The Bush drug benefit was originally expected to cost half that amount and today costs a third less than what it was initially expected to cost because it uses market forces to drive prices down.

Using market forces is directly contradictory to the Democrats' drive to socialize and appropriate much of the economy, with corporatist Fascist-type deals with big corporate sectors emulating Mussolini and Hitler. Besides their long-term goal of marginalizing and eventually minimalizing the U.S. Constitution aimed at by Constitutional "Adjunct" Professor Obama, the Democrats' short term economic claims are subject to preliminary examination as completely inept and an abject failure:

Mr. Axelrod claims the pork-laden stimulus package has been a success. But Mr. Obama told Americans that if it were passed, unemployment wouldn't rise above 8%. It is now 10%. The president also said it would create 3.7 million jobs, 90% of which would be in the private sector. By Mr. Obama's standards, the stimulus failed miserably.

in contrast, GWB's TARP has already generated profits:

Mr. Bush did sign the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) into law and loaned $240 billion to banks. But those loans are being returned at a profit to the Treasury.

But Obama has reacted to the rejection of his administration's inept dishonest hyper-spending as described by Ms. Connelly above with a predictable seizure of the TARP profits to use as a political slush fund to his favorite constituencies:

Rather than using those funds to pay down the deficit, Mr. Obama wants to use them for new spending. What's more, he has lavished some $320 billion from TARP on car companies, union allies, and pet causes that will never be fully returned.

The final blow to Obama's serial political tomfoolery, double-dealing, and Chicago-style lies and exaggerations and deceptions came when, in a fit of what can only be called complete delusional thinking:

Mr. Axelrod boasts Mr. Obama's proposed health reforms will "not add to the federal deficit." But if that turns out to be true, it will only be because Massachusetts voters just elected a senator who promises to vote against those reforms.

The witless Axelrod may now be unable to continue the RICO-style Bernie Madoff looting of the American economy by the Chicago-style Ponzi apparatus called the Obama wing of the Democrat Party. Rove finishes Axelrod off with a coup de grace:

In going after Mr. Bush's fiscal record, Mr. Axelrod unwittingly revealed why Democrats are losing. Mr. Obama and congressional Democrats have made a mess of the nation's finances and are desperate to pin the blame on someone else. It's not likely to work.

Even in deep blue Massachusetts, voters aren't standing idly by while the administration puts the nation on a dangerous trajectory. When Democrats lose a state they carried by 26 points a little more than a year ago, very little is safe for Mr. Obama's party this fall.

Axelrod and Obama and their tiny obscene strawboss Rahm-bo Emanuel may just have had their private parts exposed in the Massachusetts slamdown of their reckless feckless dishonest midnight raids on the U.S. economy. Hopefully in November, the rest of the nation will listen to Scott Brown's victory speech calling for them to hack the exposed parts off and remove the cabal in the House and Senate which tried to turn Obama's assault on the Constitution into law.

Or as Peggy Noonan says in her take onMA and Scott Brown in her interesting editorial piece today:

For Mr. Brown now, everything depends on execution. He made the Olympics. Now he has to do the swan dive, with a billion people watching. And then he has to do it again....[Obama's Inauguration] feels like another era. Because America keeps moving, the plates keep shifting, and execution is everything. Everything.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

The SCOTUS repudiation of much of McCain/Feingold and Nancy Botox's declaration that Health Care will have to wait a while because the Progressive [i.e., Marxist] wing of the Dems again proves Will Rogers' old adage is still correct is joyously accompanied to my Center-Right Independent ears with the demise of the late unloved and unlistened-to Air America.

May this AA dissolution be the overture to scaling back cable TV MSNBC's vitriolic espousals of class hatred and plain & simple prevarication by the likes of Keith Olbermann and former AA DJ Maddow. Because all she does is spin & all KO does is lie out of both sides of his mouth when he isn't BSing straight ahead. His "Special Comments" rank as verbal fecal material when he isn't simply telling lies. A potty mouth smartass who loses viewers daily to those he condescendingly considers his inferiors. One word describes such a specimen: "delusional."

It's a little off-topic, but here's the way the cable commentary shows shook out Tuesday on MA election night:

Tweety-bird Matthews is down there at around 700K, which could possibly simply be just sets without viewers, left on to keep the household pets from feeling lonely.....! Much of Matthews' raucous and haranguing commentary is comprehensible only as talking to animals, animals who are hard of hearing and respond only to repeated loud imprecations.

Matthews suffers the ignominy of being outviewed by "The View's" voluptuous intellectual Joy Behar!!! MSNBC has a full array of infrastructure bringing in the lowest subbasement of primetime cable viewing. And for all this, Zucker is re-upped and Conan is fired???

I was giving this fellow the benefit of the doubt. Then when he dissed Brown for teasing his gorgeous daughters, Beck became an attention whore, a sort of Paris Hilton with a political bent, or perhaps being twisted, to the right.

I expect any day he'll do a Charles Johnson or a John Cole of Balloon Juice and weepingly do an on-air conversion to Obama and all his works.

Levin is prickly, but about a dozen levels above Beck. Levin reminds me of Yale professor Harold Bloom, a polymath in law as Bloom is in literature. Beck is sort of a TA at a college teaching introductory poli sci or econ. Maybe Beck let his inner Peres Hilton out when he slammed Brown, whose shoes he isn't fit to polish.

As Dennis Miller would put it, he should go for a twilight fish-troll with Fredo.

Beck could never approach Keith Odorboy in prime time because KO has a solid million-plus certifiable America-hating psychos whom he plays Goebbels to every evening. But crashing and burning like the Hindenburg is a good metaphor---I occasionally watch Odorboy to see if suddenly he gets a metaphorical grand mal seizure on-air, as he has the last two nights concerning Scott Brown. KO wishes he was Brown, a REAL man instead of an over-medicated sexually inadequate whack job. Dennis Hopper bereft of any real talent. KO is just a wordy version of Beck, only malicious instead of having Beck's schlumperei.

Michael Barone is to American politics what the Encyclopedia Brittanica used to be to scholarship: the ultimate definitive reference. Here's his take on the AWESOME FREAKIN' ascent of Scott Brown of 25 points in twenty-two days. If Ted Kennedy was "the Liberal Lion," Scott Brown is the "Slayer of Liberals."

Twenty-four days ago, on Dec. 28, state Sen. Scott Brown, the Republican nominee in the Massachusetts Senate election, promised he would be the 41st vote against the Democratic health-care bill. Almost no one noticed. Mr. Brown was trailing Democrat Martha Coakley by 20 points, and she was still on her six-day Christmas break from campaigning.

Twenty-two days made a difference. On Tuesday night, Mr. Brown strode to the platform at the Park Plaza Hotel and delivered his victory speech. While Washington reporters were busy speculating on whether President Obama would use his State of the Union speech to prod Democrats into jamming through their health-care bill before Mr. Brown is seated, the new Massachusetts senator delivered what amounted to a State of the Union speech himself.

Interim Sen. Paul Kirk, he announced, had completed his work in Washington. There would be no 60th vote for a health-care bill. The president was always welcome in Massachusetts, he said. And then Mr. Brown channeled Franklin Delano Roosevelt's riposte to the attacks on his dog Fala by saying that he resented Mr. Obama's attacks on his truck.

The senator-elect didn't just hit the president on health care. "In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them," he said.

Scott Brown's 52% victory over Ms. Coakley's 47%, in the state that in the last four presidential elections voted more Democratic than any other, is the harshest repudiation of a president since Democrat Richard Vander Veen won Gerald Ford's House seat in Michigan in 1974 by a 51%-44% margin.

That Democratic victory in the historical Republican heartland of Michigan signaled that Americans were repelled by the Watergate scandal and had had enough of Richard Nixon. He resigned from office six months later.

The Republican victory in the current Democratic heartland of Massachusetts sends the message that Americans are repelled by Barack Obama's big-government programs, backroom deals and oversolicitude for those who want to destroy us.

On Tuesday night Scott Brown took command and sent a clear message: The president must change course. Barack Obama, who was a state senator himself not so long ago, needs to listen.

Yes, Barone is from Michigan & I went to U of Mich at Ann Arbor back in the sixties, but I think you have to refer back to Truman's amazing upset of Dewey in '48 for a real analogy.

And since direct elections to the Senate were established just over 100 years ago by Teddy Rooseveldt's progressives, there has never been a greater comeback: From 20 points down in the polls on Dec. 28th to FIVE POINTS UP twenty-two days later.A tsunami or a Krakatoa.

Of course, Dec. 28th is when the country began to consider the implications of the Christmas Eve Health Care Debacle being signed. The monstrous whore Mary of LA's Louisiana Purchase and her pimp counterpart Ben Nelson of the Cornhusker Kickback were just the appetizers. Then a bunch of union thugs coerced Obambi to give them tax-free Cadillac health coverage as a special privilege. That is when the Great Wave off the north shore of Oahu began to build. And from then on, Brown hopped on and skillfully rode the Pipeline perfectly and surfed into history with a stunning, breath-taking crushing victory.

Now Choakley will be blamed by the libtards, and they will insist on ramming and jamming this dildo of an ObamaCare debacle up America's butt with parliamentary legerdemain.

THR has the story as Conan continues to more than double Letterboy's numbers and making himself irresistible to Fox if they want to pivot youthward. And in the meantime, Zucker continues a**hole haggling over severance for Conan's staff, many of whom relocated:

The fine print in question continues to be severance protection for the "Tonight" staff.Meanwhile, the imminent departure agrees very well with O'Brien. The pressure to adapt his quirky persona to the broader "Tonight" and to improve the show's ratings is gone. He is fearless, his jokes are sharper, and his ratings are through the roof. In the local market overnights for Tuesday night, he scored a 1.9 rating in adults 18-49, crushing CBS' "Late Show With David Letterman" (0.7)

And in his opening monologue Wednesday night, he lobbed such zingers as "I should have known something was up when NBC sent me that 2010 calendar that only went up to January." Talk about a great audition for the young-skewing Fox, whose brass are getting higher and higher on launching an O'Brien-fronted daily talk show in the fall.It looks like they could finally open formal talks on Thursday.

I for one enjoyed Conan's short, but snappy run and hope he keeps Andy Richter, whom I enjoy very much. I'd stay up to watch him on Fox, where he doesn't have the human rubbish NBC corporates lurking and loitering around scaring sane people.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Barney Frank recanted his momentary lucidity last night and now displays the equal parts of ignorance and arrogance that go with being a Dem politician. Here's some Barney prattle, with the Elmer Fudd w's not inserted:"

You have to pass the Senate bill as is and the President signs it. Then people have to be assured that you can get the amendments through the House and the Senate," Frank said. "Because then the argument would be, 'Look, the bills already passed so now the question is whether you're willing to amend it or not.'"

One way to do that would be through the filibuster proof budget reconciliation process. "The alternative would be, people are talking about using reconciliation: 51 votes to get the agreed on amendments in the Senate."

The problem, Frank noted, is that reconciliation can only be used for some measures--revenue and spending measures, with implications for the federal budget--and not others. Some elements of the fix, then, could be passed through reconciliation, requiring only a simple majority in the Senate. The trick would be to get the other contentious measures--abortion, immigration--fixed through the regular order.

Being a denizen of the House, Barney may be more than a bit fuzzy about reconciliation, which is to be used only on tax and budget laws [The Byrd Rule]. In reconciliation, every SENTENCE in the 1000-plus pages of the Senate bill would have to be examined for tax and budgetary versus policy implications. If one Senator says the sentence must be voted on because it is a policy rather than fiscal or tax issue, the rule is that 60 [sixty] votes have to affirm the sentence as subject to reconciliation, which can be passed with 51 votes. Sen. Gregg explained this to Greta van S.

Frank went on to try to buffalo Olympia Snowe as the 60th vote, which shows us how silly and really shallow this mile-a-minute madman can be when he finds himself being torqued leftward!

Facebook Badge

Links

About Me

"''I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young And weep because I know all things now: I have been a hazel-tree, and they hung The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough
Among my leaves in times out of mind....' Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments...the fortune of us that are the moon's men doth ebb and flow like the sea, being govern'd, as the sea is, by the moon."
Twenty-and-eight the phases of the moon, The full and the moon’s dark and all the crescents, Twenty-and-eight, and yet but six-and-twenty The cradles that a man must needs be rocked in: For there’s no human life at the full or the dark. From the first crescent to the half, the dream But summons to adventure and the man Is always happy like a bird or a beast; But while the moon is rounding towards the full He follows whatever whim’s most difficult...An aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress....Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.